PARENTNG: BY DESIGN
You’ve heard me say that life goes better if you have a guide. And you’ll be happy to know I still hold to that! The family is a unique community designed to include two guides for every set of children. The importance of family is superseded only by the marriage between a man and woman.
Both, I believe, are God’s mastermind and design for the foundation of any thriving community and, for that matter, any civilization.
According to original design, the father was tasked with the loving leadership of his wife and their kids. The mother, by design was to be a strong co-pilot with her own strengths and abilities to help lead the family. Father and mother each had strengths and weaknesses and were designed to fill in where the other lacked and where each had gaps.
By design, this was and is supposed to work not only to produce strong family units, but strong communities at large and ultimately a strong society.
What happens, though, when the design is tinkered with or ignored altogether, when the plans fail, when things start going sideways…leaking over generations? I have a particular interest in this as a man who has been a grandson, is still a son and a father and a grandfather.
As a father, I unintentionally repeated some of my father’s patterns, and made some intentional changes. In today’s language of parenting studies I would be called an “involved father”. As a grandfather, I”m recognizing wonderful opportunities to speak into my grandkids’ lives and even my adult kids’ lives (with discretion and permission, of course)…apologizing for the lack of intention and for gaps in affirmation and encouragement that every child needs.
UNINTENTIONAL PARENTING HAS A HUGE DOWNSIDE…
With all this in mind, I wanted to share results from some current studies.
One from the National Fatherhood Initiative….the other a compilation by researchers Sarah Allen and Kerry Daly on behalf of the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Some of the results are disturbing…while others are very encouraging…
Both negative and positive results point to one very “Captain Obvious” conclusion about the original design: It works! You see, the father’s role in the family is not a throw-away role. It’s not a secondary role. Rather, it’s a primary role and a must-have role that sets the family up for success…again, if done by design.
With that in mind, let’s first take a look at some of the negative affects of the lack of father involvement:
• Children raised in a father-absent home are two times more likely to suffer from obesity.
• Adolescent boys with absent fathers are more likely to engage in delinquency than those with fathers who are present.
• Individuals from father absent homes are 279% more likely to carry guns and deal drugs than their peers living with their fathers.
• Children raised in a father-absent home are more likely to experience behavioral problems.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to father absence or lack of involvement in the home.
INTENTIONAL PARENTING HAS A HUGE UPSIDE…
But what happens when the father IS present and when the father IS highly involved. The statistics point to some very encouraging outcomes. Check this out:
• Infants of highly involved fathers, as measured by the amount of interaction, including higher levels of play and caregiving activities, are more cognitively competent at 6 months and score higher on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development.
• Children of involved fathers are more likely to demonstrate more cognitive competence on standardized intellectual assessments.
• Children of involved fathers are more likely to enjoy school, have positive attitudes toward school, participate in extra curricular activities and graduate. They are also less likely to fail a grade, have poor attendance, be suspended or expelled, or have behavior problems at school.
• Children of involved fathers are more likely to demonstrate a greater tolerance for stress and frustration, have superior problem solving and adaptive skills, be more playful, resourceful, skillful and attentive when presented with a problem.
• Children of involved fathers are more likely to have positive peer relations and be popular and well liked. Their peer relations are typified by less negativity, aggression and conflict, and more reciprocity, more generosity and more positive friendship qualities.
• Young adults who had available fathers are more likely to score high on measures of self acceptance and social adjustment, and see themselves as dependable, trusting, practical and friendly.
• Overall, father love appears to be as heavily implicated as mother love in offsprings’ psychological well-being and health, as well as in an array of psychological and behavioral problems.
These results, I think we could all agree, are highly encouraging. The design DOES work, as long as the work is done by design. Highly involved parents are important. A highly involved father is a strong predictor of a child’s developmental success!
ARE YOU THINKING WHAT I’M THINKING?
According to these findings about having a present and highly involved father, it’s possible I could’ve been an overweight, drug addicted felon…or just maladjusted in any number of ways. (And no, I wasn’t suggesting that’s possibly what you were thinking, lol…but the next statement is).
But these are stats and indicators and should be seen as such. Not as promises or prophecies of hard and fast outcomes.
By design we’ve all been created with a free will and the ability to choose our way and with a resiliency to overcome…and so many do! How much better life goes, though, when it goes by design…and with a highly involved guide!
